Another find in a second hand shop. Hope you're all not tired of my finds, someday I hope to know enough choose a some fine original artist tea ware and be able to afford it. But for now, I'm having fun hunting.

The darker one is actually a very dark almost black cherry burgundy. I have been using it for herbal teas. The other is cute and have been using for jasmine tea which is slowly staining it beige, inside and out. If you look close, you can see crackling in the glaze which is I guess why it's taking on the color of the tea, but I don't mind the color change.

BarbJ wrote:Another find in a second hand shop. Hope you're all not tired of my finds, someday I hope to know enough choose a some fine original artist tea ware and be able to afford it. But for now, I'm having fun hunting.

The darker one is actually a very dark almost black cherry burgundy. I have been using it for herbal teas. The other is cute and have been using for jasmine tea which is slowly staining it beige, inside and out. If you look close, you can see crackling in the glaze which is I guess why it's taking on the color of the tea, but I don't mind the color change.

BarbJ wrote:Another find in a second hand shop. Hope you're all not tired of my finds, someday I hope to know enough choose a some fine original artist tea ware and be able to afford it. But for now, I'm having fun hunting.

I don't do as much thrift shopping as I used to, because the shops near my home in the city now are heavily used and good stuff gets snapped up FAST. But when I lived in a suburb there were much richer pickings, and I got some great stuff that way. Some of what you find may well be artist originals, but you just don't have the boxes to prove it. That shouldn't diminish the pleasure of owning and using something beautifully made to enhance your tea experience.

And where will the new original pieces we're acquiring now end up someday, if there aren't people scouring the second hand shops for finds?

The sizes are 9mm x 5.5mm (3-1/2" x 2-1/8") for the darker one, 8mm x 6mm (3-1/8" x 2-1/4") and both are about 150ml.

I do live in a suburban bedroom type community. It also has a large population of Asians from all over Asia. My neighbors are from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Thailand and other South-East Asia countries, Philippines, and surrounding countries, and Middle-east countries as well.We have new immigrants and 1st, 2nd and 3rd generations also.

So probably because of that, I find all kinds of cool tea ware items quite often. I bet a lot of the kids donate it when cleaning out their parents or grandparents stuff because it's not really that special or unusual to them, and maybe considered "old fashioned" to them.

Yeah, I wonder if some stuff gets donated because someone thinks it's "ugly", not knowing it's a particular style and is a hand-made artists piece.

But I love it, and because of that I get lucky quite often at the second-hand stores!